Teachers working together to improve student achievement in reading and writing

December 08, 2007

What Do I Do When They Finish a Book?

“It’s great that kids do all this reading and that teachers do all this conferencing, but when do I get something to grade?”

I get this question, or a variation of it, all the time. It probably comes from that part of us that says kids aren’t really working unless they have work to turn in. Another part simply reflects the reality that standards-based teaching is driven by the need for assessable products.

Personally, I feel very comfortable letting kids finish one book and
pick up another without doing some kind of assignment. My conference
notes and their journal records tell me almost everything I need to
know about their reading development. But I also like to review
tangible work product, and I believe that kids benefit greatly from
producing a lot of it. So the question isn’t whether the work matters
more than the reading, it’s what matters most when it comes to the
responsibility we have to help kids become better readers and better
thinkers?

I base the selection of assignments I give on the kinds of
after-reading activities pursued by literate people in both popular and
academic traditions. As a student struggling to understand the purpose
of my teachers’ assignments, I never felt comfortable with many
traditional book activities, especially book reports and anything that
involved art. Nor as an adult have I ever jumped up from bed after
finishing a novel with the irresistible urge to make a diorama.

The after-reading activities I like are based on talking or writing,
and each is grounded in traditions of real-life literacy. Here are
eight things I like to see kids doing after they finish a book:

Give a talk. Book talks are my favorite because of the
wonderful contribution they make to our reading community. I try to
keep them short. The reader gets 2-3 minutes to tell us about the book,
and then the audience gets 2-3 minutes to ask questions. Invariably,
they go well over the 5-6 minutes I usually allot for them. But that’s
just because everyone enjoys them so much. More often than not, kids in
the audience are inspired to choose the book under discussion for a
future read. Then we get additional talks on the same book. This is
even more interesting because I tell kids they have to come up with new
and interesting things to say, and because I tell the audience they
have to come up with new and interesting questions to ask.

Give a reading. Kids need to hear a lot of good reading.
Much of that comes from me through modeling and thinkalouds, but the
most effective demonstrations come from the kids themselves. I do a lot
of explicit teaching on expressive reading so kids understand many
different techniques for reading out loud. I ask them to copy out the
passage they plan to read, to practice it many times, and even to mark
it up with specific notations for how they plan to present it. I want
this to be a formal dramatic reading and I work with kids much as a
director might work with an actor. They don’t have put on costumes or
anything like that, but I insist on “full-throated” expression and I
establish the expectation that they have to be entertaining as well as
precise. If book talks do the most to inspire good discussions in
class, formal readings do the most to inspire quality in our reading.
Each successful reading seems to ratchet up everyone’s expectations of
what is possible. Ideally, I would like to have a short formal reading
almost every day.

Write a review. Like book talks, book reviews sell readers
on books (or scare them away, although I don’t get too many negative
reviews). Book reviews are a great way to help kids develop critical
thinking skills related to reading. We start with models of real
reviews from sources like Amazon.com. But we also look at more formal
examples in newspapers and magazines. We work through an ongoing lesson
called, “What Can You Say About a Book?” where we make a list of all
the different aspects of a book a reviewer might discuss. Kids enjoy
the power they have to influence others. Reviews are the best first
step in getting kids comfortable with literary criticism. They lead
naturally to traditional academic forms like close reading and literary
analysis.

Do a close reading. In the traditional close reading, a
reader takes a poem or short prose passage and interprets it
extensively in as detailed a way as possible. In one sense, a close
reading is the opposite of a review. Where a review treats lightly many
parts of an entire work, a close reading focuses intently on a small
but significant portion. Writing up a close reading is hard; I have to
teach kids many things about it, and we have to practice it together
many times, before they can do it well. We also have to practice
interpreting short passages together on a regular basis either in
lessons or in conferences. I don’t typically ask elementary age
students to do full essays based on close readings, though I do engage
kids of all ages in frequent close reading activities because I want to
make sure that every student develops the basic skill of careful study
and thoughtful explanation that close reading requires.

Write a literary analysis. At the high school level, it’s
important to introduce kids to the kind of formal academic writing
they’ll be doing about books if they decide to go to college. Working
on book talks, book reviews, and close readings gets kids ready for
this most challenging form. I share many models and talk about my own
experience as an English major in college.

Write an essay. Readers are often inspired to write by the
ideas they encounter. When a reader has been significantly affected by
a book, and the traditional forms don’t seem to capture their
experience, I encourage them to write an essay. The essay can take any
form and serve any purpose, but it must include explicit references to
the book that inspired it. Kids don’t often choose to do this kind of
writing but when they do, it’s often very interesting.

Present an annotated collection of excerpts. Serious
readers, especially if they think of themselves as writers, too, get in
the habit of copying down passages that catch their attention. I love
to have kids collect them. As a potential after-reading product, I
allow kids to formally collect and publish a set of these excerpts from
one or more texts. Each collection has to have some organizing
principle like “great descriptions” or “effective characterizations” or
“well-constructed sentences”, and each has to be annotated briefly to
explain why it was chosen.

Publish your journal entries. Some kids are incredible
journal writers, and since journals are often published in the real
world, I tell kids they can publish parts of their reading journals if
they feel like it. This usually involves gathering together the most
prominent entries on a particular book, editing them for clarity, and
writing a brief commentary that ties together the reader’s experience.

I like to see kids reading 20-30 books a year plus bits and pieces of
poetry, journalism, and other forms. Ideally, I would like to see
students succeed at each of the eight activities I’ve listed here. But
that doesn’t happen. Every student has his or her strengths and I like
to nurture individual talents as much as I can. My bottom line is that
I want every kid to do several book talks, book reviews, and formal
readings. The other essential activity is close reading. But I work on
that so regularly in lessons and conferences that it’s easy for me to
gauge a student’s skill without an assignment. For students in the high
school years, however, I feel that close reading is required because so
much of what they will do in college depends on this ability.

As I mentioned above, I don’t think a kid should have to do something
for every book they read. After all, the most frequent after-reading
task an adult reader undertakes is to think about what he or she will
read next. Based on other things we’re doing, I determine a reasonable
number of reading-related assignments to include in their portfolios
but I don’t worry if this is less than the total number of books they
read. Nor do I think kids should do any after-reading task simply to
prove to me that they have read a book. I can tell just by conferencing
with them if they’ve read it. The point of these activities is not to
have something to grade or something I can use to check up on kids. The
point is to give them authentic experiences that increase the ownership
they have of their literacy.

Kids value reading differently when we ask them to think, talk, and
write about it. When they represent their reading to the class, they
become more aware that their reading represents them. They start to
think about the books they choose. They start to care about whether a
book lives up to its promise. They start to realize that the once
solitary and passive act of reading has a powerful social dimension
they had never before considered.

The question, “What do I do when they finish a book?” has an infinite
number of answers. The best response I can give is this: “Do something
real.” It’s important to me that the work I ask kids to do around books
be as authentic as possible. It’s incredibly helpful to base my
teaching on real-world models. I also find it easier to teach something
if I’ve seen it out in the world for much of my life. From the kids’
perspective, authenticity can be a motivator—at least they know that
I’m not arbitrarily wasting their time just to get something in a grade
book.

2 Comments

In Search of a Golden Line

One strategy I use in my class in reading is finding a golden line in a book. I give students about 10 minutes to read in class and ask them to pick a sentence that inspires them or speaks to them for whatever reason.

When the ten minutes are over, I share my line with them and explain why I have chosen that particular line. Then I ask them to share their lines with each other first and then with class.

This simple scavenger hunt of some sort later morphs into a journaling activity: they copy the sentence from the book word for word and try to mimic it in a sentence of their own as a golden line to be used in their future writing.

I find this to be a very creative activity. Not only do students have to think critically as to which sentence calls them, they also have to think of a way they can employ a similar sentence in their own pieces. Especially for those students whose native language is not English, this proves to be beneficial in their mimicking of the language in a safe mode.